Movies 'Til Dawn Blog

HOLLYWOOD, 1928

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG0rnd-m3CU Here is a fascinating travelogue reel showing Hollywood and environs in 1928 (not 1929 as the YouTube poster has labeled it). I date it as late summer/early winter ’28 as the two movies we see advertised, ‘Four Rooms’ and ‘The Man Who Laughs’, were released in August and November

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HOLLYWOOD, ’31

Yesterday we took a drive down Sunset Blvd. in 1952. Let’s leap backwards twenty years and get some color glimpses of L.A. in 1931. This neat little newsreel is essentially an architectural tour–what else really is there to do in L.A. other than drive around looking at houses?–but at the

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SUNSET BLVD. THEN/NOW

Dig this nifty video showing filmed driving footage of Sunset Blvd. in 1952 contrasted with a still image of the same street corner today whenever the car in the earlier footage stops at a light. We can date the old footage from early May, 1952–‘Singin’ in the Rain’ & ‘The

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HOLLYWOOD, ’48: ARE WE EVER TRULY ALONE ANYMORE?

This is pretty messed up. I’ve been re-reading James Ellroy’s ‘The Black Dahlia’, the first novel in his L.A. Quartet and one that I haven’t revisited in many years. Thus, it’s fair to say that I am fully immersed in the post WW2 L.A. noir of it all. Now, YouTube

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THE GARDEN OF ALLAH–A MOVIE AND A MODEL?

The famous West Hollywood bungalow court ‘The Garden Of Allah’ was on the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Crescent Heights in West Hollywood and was host to all kinds of east coast Hollywood transplants for well over thirty years (specializing in alcoholic self-loathing Broadway playwrights and their ilk). Click here

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MORE SMOG, MORE 70s, MORE L.A.

Apropos of Monday’s post featuring some fascinatingly mundane (yes I just jammed those two words together and did so on purpose) footage of L.A. in the 70s, here’s more of the same but with a tourists touch. We get some nice nasty Freeway shots, a little Sunset Strip, a tad

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JEAN HARLOW IN WHITLEY HEIGHTS

Here’s a completely obscure, not to say befuddling, piece of footage showing us Jean Harlow in conversation with her ‘vocal coach’ Samuel Kayzer. (It somehow makes sense that this footage is entirely silent). Who shot it? For what purpose? It doesn’t look professionally done so was it some kind of

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THE MAKING OF ‘FEDORA’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS2XRiN9xbE ‘Fedora’ (1978), written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond and directed by Wilder, was the teams penultimate film and for all intents and purposes the more appropriate finish to their legendary partnership than their unfortunate final outing ‘Buddy Buddy’. I saw the film in its Los Angeles first (and

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MONROE V. CUKOR–A BIT OF BANTER

To finish off this weeks Marilyn M. expedition, let’s view this very short but very interesting clip of film from the abortive ‘Somethings Got To Give’ shoot. It’s a brief moment just after the shot’s been slated but before Cukor has said ‘action’ (or ‘camera’ as was his habit) in

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BURTON HOLMES PRESENTS: HOLLYWOOD IN THE 30s!

Below is a marvelous short series of clips of Hollywood in the early 1930s as photographed by the then famous (and now forgotten) Burton Holmes, inventor of the ‘travelogue’. Holmes was a moderately successful ‘travel lecturer’ beginning in the late 19th century when this was a particularly exotic profession. He

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